Word: shorted
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seconds one night last spring, the blinding flash of a huge meteor lit up the sky over central Mexico. A short time later, a B57 sped to the scene from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N. Mex. Its mission was to collect any debris that might still be adrift after the fireball's searing entry into the earth's atmosphere. For the second time in history, investigators had been alerted quickly enough to seek such dust, which provides invaluable clues to the origin and chemical makeup of meteorites...
...attempt demonstrated the extraordinary efficiency of a pioneering early-warning system that is called the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. Based at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., the center uses volunteer observers and the Smithsonian's satellite-tracking communications network to inform the world's scientists about important natural events. It has one extraordinary requirement: like the meteor over Mexico, the phenomena that it reports must be so fleeting that they can be successfully studied only while they occur or very shortly thereafter...
...beat on nature, the center operates at press-agency speed. With nine telephone lines and 15 Teletypes at his disposal, Center Director Robert Citron, 37, can reach investigators almost anywhere in the world within minutes after an alert. By last week the center had reported more than 199 major short-lived phenomena, including 41 earthquakes, 26 volcanic eruptions, 29 fireballs, 20 major oil spills, ten animal migrations and one red tide (a strange discoloration of the seas caused by a sudden spread of tiny marine organisms). Fifty-one of these events were important enough to warrant full-scale scientific investigations...
...Lawrence of Arabia, the burden of his illegitimacy weighed so heavily that it drove him to deeds of improbable and even reckless heroism. In the bizarre personage of King Atahuallpa (Christopher Plummer) Pizarro encounters a man of his own kind, an implacable and almost superhuman force. Atahuallpa gives short shrift to the rabid Catholic missionaries in Pizarro's party and, looking into the explorer's eyes, says tellingly: "Their God is not in your face." Replies Pizarro: "I see my father in your face." The eventual and inevitable execution of Atahuallpa becomes a pat symbol of Pizarro...
...really cannot abide. He complains of the way jet fighters were shipped to India's unfriendly neighbor Pakistan. It was, he remarks acidly, about as furtive as "mass sodomy on the B.M.T. at rush hour." But it is another vexing American institution, the State Department-which he considers short on policy, long on platitude-that Galbraith finds hardest to forgive. "Mindless," "petty," "pompous" and "late" are only a few of the acid adjectives he applies to Foggy Bottom, and for the most part he bluntly takes Dean Rusk to be its accurate personification...